


Fair Exchange is no Robbery

by StripySock



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: (both of them), Canon Era, Crossdressing, F/M, Pegging, criminals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-19
Updated: 2013-07-19
Packaged: 2017-12-20 17:23:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/889871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StripySock/pseuds/StripySock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eponine wants a favour from Montparnasse but he does nothing for free and has some eclectic desires.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fair Exchange is no Robbery

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sath](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sath/gifts).



She can’t help thinking as she walks into his rooms, that for a man who is ever so nice about his personal habits (today he is glossy and immaculate in dark blue waistcoat with silver patterning, and his boots could pass for those of a far richer man) that he is a terrible slut about the housekeeping. Eponine has never been the sort of girl whose hands itch for a cloth on seeing dust about the place and she lounges against the wall, waits with indifferent eyes for him to be finished whatever he is about, fussing in the drawer like that, and either to fuck her or fulfil his promise. She’d rather like it to be both.

 

As he delays, she takes the time to case the room with expert eyes, she does not thieve on a wholesale basis like her father (just a little bread on the side, just a little space for the night) but there are some habits that are hard to break. Being a scrawny twelve year old hoisted through a window, to writhe lithe as an eel in a pot into a room and either open the doors, or silently hand things out had taught her all too much she would not forget. When she filled out a little, her father had stopped suggesting burglary and started suggesting that she make eyes at likely gentlemen, and that was when she’d wriggled away again- only this time from him- and Gavroche never could be found. She wasn’t sure what her father did now, but there were small children enough in the world that had been trained to silence.

 

His room is unlike anywhere she has ever been. Its pretension is to be the sort of place where beautiful ladies unrobed for the delectation of suave gentlemen, a salon perhaps, with filigree chairs and large mirrors, but the poverty of it all showed through stark and bare, a too old whore with a painted face and no teeth left in her head. In fact, with the swathe of velvet across the walls, only half motheaten and the elaborately painted vase filled with dying anemones, it reminded Eponine of nothing so much as a brothel run into the ground by a madam who had taken to the drink.

 

Montparnasse is both incongruous in his dapper presentation and strangely at home as he rifles through drawers upon drawers of clothing, both inner and outer, more than Eponine has ever seen let alone owned, as though he spends his time robbing tailors and haberdashers and looting their stock. There is something about the faded grandeur of his surroundings that made him at once pitiful and frightening though Eponine never have dreamed of voicing either. The only way to deal with Montparnasse is never to show him fear.

 

He surfaces at last and brandishes clothes that look to her immensely ornate, grins a savage grin at her as he flourishes them. “Little Eponine," he croons and she cannot help her shiver, cannot help the way the skin rises on her arms. “I understand," he says, “that you need some new clothes."

 

That is true at least. Hers are almost worn through, an all too scanty shift, a petticoat more mud than fabric, a dress whose better days had been seen long before they’d swathed her mother’s ample bulk before her. Her shoes are worse than useless sometimes, worn through to pitiful shadows of themselves, and she longs with a simple bright fierceness for something that will make Marius turn his eyes her way. She imagines a red dress, considers washing her hair despite the difficulties that such an undertaking commences, maybe even borrowing some shoes from the light footed woman who owns the rooms above hers.

"Yes," she says boldly. He owes her a favour, he can loan her a dress. He says his conquests leave them behind, and she tries not to think why a grisette might run through the street in just a shift, though from just seeing the dresses in tiny glimpses as he rifles through crushed silk, folded muslin crumpled beyond repair, she can tell they’re new, no twice-worn cast downs for Montparnasse it seems, in any area of his life. She tries not to think what he might request, thinks only of how Marius might look at her if she is something different, something new, if rouge colours cheeks she knows to be too thin, a fine new dress might dazzle him from his unthinking kindness. It is worth it.

 

He tuts, a little click of the tongue that sets her nerves on edge and makes them sing with tension. “Dear Eponine," he says, like he might address a girl he had to work to woo, though the little flick at the end stings. “I rather think I have nothing in your size," and indeed the dress he shows- the red silk she had thought of in only tiny glimpses there before her eyes, is too visibly too big, and she aches at the thought.

 

"Please," she says, “dresses can be altered," she knows that at least. Azelma has some skill with her needle, she could with a few flourishes fit it to Eponine’s frame, conceal the hollows of her figure with a furbelow here, a flounce there, and she lets herself indulge in those thoughts for a second, though why Azelma should do such a thing without payment was something even fantasy could not swipe away.

 

He holds it out of her reach, flings it down carelessly as though it is nothing to him. “You could not fit it," he says, and turns again to search as though he mocks her with what she cannot have. A dull grief rises in her throat as though he hasn’t merely torn the dress from her grasp but also dashed some fragile hope, but she swallows it back down grimly and faces him square on.

 

"What do you want for it?" she demands, clearly lying to Maria for him had not sufficed.

 

He hesitates for long seconds, flicks his eyes up and down her frame with a scrutiny that is almost too hard to bear. She bears up stoically though, doesn’t flinch from his appraisal, and he grins. “I shall think about it," he says, and tosses her a pair of trousers, a shirt and a waistcoat that she stares at numbly. They are not the things she has dreamed of, though she has worn men’s clothing before more than once. He reads her look of disappointment easily though, comes a little closer, rubs a cold hand down the sharp wing of her shoulder blade. “Just for a little while," he says, and she understands. This isn’t the first time she has seen what he proposes. Girls with their hair bundled up in hats, smart in male clothing, indistinguishable from dandies save for between their legs can do a roaring trade in certain bars.

 

“Yes,” she says, no hesitation at all. A good fuck is a good fuck, a pretty dress is a pretty dress. She is not averse to having either of them. Then as he relaxes, a sudden thought clearly strikes him.

 

“You of course won’t talk about this,” and it’s barely a threat, there is always an air of silken menace about him, and she remembers with no trying how many bodies he has left behind him and draws in a slow breath.

 

“Of course not,” she says agreeably, “for the sake of our friendship,” for she too is not averse to a certain kind of joke, and she is rewarded with a look of re-evaluation in her turn which she greets with wide eyes, mimicking a certain kind of naive that she sees only on the faces of very rich, very young girls, and he laughs, long and low, and she can’t resist pressing her luck. “I think you should wear this,” she says and picks up the red silk and smoothes it out with careful hands. He was right, the proportions do not fit her, but she has quick eyes and has divined almost instinctively who it was made for.

 

There’s a moment where his hand twitches a little as though for his knife and she makes ready to flee, before he relaxes as though he has thought the better of it. “Naturally,” he says and makes it sound as though that had been the plan all along. “Now, change,” and he makes her wash her hands before she begins in a chipped china bowl, and then he passes her clothing, shows her behind a curtain with some coy prudishness that amuses her. Concealed between the shirt and the trousers there is something that makes her blush redder and hotter than she had thought possible. Fucking a man dressed like this while he pretended to be a woman had not achieved this flush from her, but there’s something about the arrangement of the leather straps that makes her first go hot and then cold, and if that hadn’t then the blatant reality of the wooden phallus would have.

 

She struggles to put in, guessing correctly that the straps wind around her thighs, brown leather in sharp contrast to her fishbelly white thighs and she wonders how often Montparnasse must do this to have had this stitched and made by some saddlery perhaps, and she feels like nothing more or less than a horse, particularly when the phallus is in place between her thighs. She doesn’t know how to tighten the straps so that it looks erect and instead struggles into the trousers he has left her, pulls on the shirt that is loose enough to conceal her already slight swell of breasts, and then the waistcoat over it- gaudy in green. The boots that he’d kicked in after her are too large even though Montparnasse is so proud of his tiny feet, but they’ll do for a few moments at least. There is little she can do about her hair but she pulls it back with the ribbon he’d provided, ties it with the flourish she’s occasionally seen older gentleman wear.

 

Then, wood dragging against her thigh, held in place by straps and cloth, she shuffles on out. She expects Montparnasse perhaps to be half dressed, but he is standing sharp and impatient by the mirror as he waits for her, petulance in every line of his frame, and she can’t restrain a gasp. She is a girl in a man’s clothing and she thinks she passes well enough. Montparnasse is a woman in every way that counts. He does not merely wear the dress with the same cock of the hip that she’s seen in elegant women as they flirt leaving the theatre, but the dress fits. He has done something with his face as well, nothing so sharp as rouge and powder but his eyes are darker and his lips even redder and he looks like some adorable grisette who has been biting at them all evening.

 

"Well?" he says, almost sharp, and she realises with a sudden glee that he is _nervous._

 

She knows how to flatter him best though, keep his mood high, nothing works on him like a compliment. “You’re beautiful," she says, picks the word deliberately and he flushes a little as though he can’t help it.

 

"That’s all very well," he says, “are you ready?" She nods and instinctively smoothes a hand over the bulge by her thigh, and his eyes follow as though drawn by magnetic force. “Good," he says softer now, and beneath the gaudiness of the dress, is Montparnasse still, variable in mood and inclination, as swift to a knife as to a kiss, and the fear that is always a little beneath the surface bubbles again, sends sparks that are not quite arousal down her spine but that are not so different after all. She has never met anyone quite like him before, and when he steps closer, rustling in silk-like material, the red suiting him as much as anything ever did, she shivers involuntarily. He notices that- as he notices everything that pertains to him, and nothing else, and his too red lips twitch up at the corners. He is taller than her, splendid and imposing and when he kisses her, all she can taste is smooth waxiness for a second until he opens his mouth properly. As though by instinct she finds her hands settling around his waist, grasping slippery material, soft on her hands. He sighs a little, a fakery of sorts she thinks, that sound does not belong to him.

 

Still, Eponine will take what she can get, presses up close to him, the hardness of her borrowed prick up against his leg and he hitches his apart just a little like a maiden not quite certain of what to do, and his hands skilled and familiar roam up her back, and then insinuate themselves beneath her shirt. They’re cool on her back and she feels a shudder go up her spine, barely perceptible she thinks and yet his mouth bends into a smile under her lips. “On the bed," he whispers, and she follows him as though on a chain, and waits unsure of what to do. He solves that for her by undoing her trousers and pushing them down to mid thigh. She kicks them off from there, stands there naked and unsure, her cunny already a little wet even though she knows that he has no intention of touching her properly. When she looks down, she thinks she looks a little absurd, wooden prick polished to a high shine, leather straps encircling skinny thighs, but the look on Montparnasse’s face is not laughter, but rather a deep and hungry kind of greed.

 

Without scolding her for not fastening it properly, he slides down on his knees before her, and she takes a deep breath, winds her hands into the hair that she’s never been allowed to touch like this before. He doesn’t care, just shows white teeth as he fumbles with her thighs, tightens the straps until the phallus is at a better angle, and then teasingly coaxes his fingers along the curve of her thigh where already she is wet, doesn’t touch her properly, just inclines his head and sucks at the end of her prick. She can’t feel anything but the heavy weight of it against her, the now too tight feeling of the straps against her skin, but she can see how it looks, doesn’t repress the gasp that rises to her lips as he opens his mouth wide, takes her deep for a second, cheeks hollowing against the impact before he slides back and stands. There’s nothing of the grisette about him now, she can see the darkness of his eyes as he lies back and tosses her a little pot of something- she has no idea what.

 

"Slick yourself with this," he says, and his fingers are tight around his cock underneath his dress now, full and hard and wet, and he is stroking himself absentmindedly as he watches her work the greasy substance onto her makeshift prick with the short strokes she’d use to stroke a man. Arousal is coming hot and heavy to her now, beginning in the base of her spine and spreading outwards, and she presses her own thighs together, feels how they would slide if it weren’t for the leather straps between them. All of a sudden, she wants him on his knees again, wants to slide it into his throat and watch him take it, eyelids fluttering shut over that malicious darkness, but she waits for him to direct her, unsure of what they’ll do next, no clue about what comes after.

 

He grows impatient after a time of watching her, and turns onto his front for a moment, skirts rucked up impossibly high, the taut curve of his arse apparent, and then as thought thinking the better of it he turns round again and gestures her impatiently forward, tilts his hips upwards, exposing the length and hardness of his cock, the smoothness of his thighs, and he has two fingers pressed against himself, slides them in with such ease that she suspects he must be ready already.

 

“Pass me the damn ointment,” he says, and she does, kneels on the bed and he throws her a disdainful glance as though to complain that he must do all this himself. Obediently she slicks her own fingers up, presses them tentatively against where he is buried knuckle deep within himself, and with a tiny gasp she is inside him, finger against his own, so tight and hot, like and yet unlike the way she has touched herself in the past, the same heat, but different, and he slides his own fingers out, splays his hands towards the side, and inclines his hips towards her a little more as with the barest effort she pushes another finger in, and then the third. He is tight around her, flutters with movement and when she looks at him, his eyes are finally closed, a drop of sweat rolling down the side of his face, his dress a wreck around him and she wastes a moment mourning for it, before she presses in deeper, up to her own knuckles, unbelieving at how he moves around her, the ease with which he folds in this way.

 

Eponine does not know how long they do this, how long she presses against Montparnasse and feels him retreat beneath her, but all too soon he tires of it, folds firm fingers around her wrist and draws her away, bends back his legs enough that narrow as she is, she can kneel over him and press the head of the prick against him, watch him struggle against it, press once, twice three times before he grows impatient and tugs her forward again, and smooth as butter she slides on in. Unlike with her fingers, she can’t feel anything like this, bar the blunt pressure of the other end of the phallus pressing against her , nothing close to satisfying her need but still a reminder that she is four inches deep within Montparnasse and he has lost all his cool as she fucks him. There are hectic red patches on his cheeks now and he moans once, not the polite little sigh of earlier, acting a role, but deep as though it’s torn from him, opens his eyes and looks at her before he grins his usual savage grin.

 

“Deeper Eponine,” he gasps, and though the clutch of his body is so tight around her that she fears for the integrity of the straps, she pushes on until they’re thigh against thigh, and she’s so deep that she can get no closer. Their flesh is sticky and hot against each other, she feels the clutch of his skin against hers and can hardly bear it. He makes no move to kiss her, no matter how possible it might be, just opens his red lips and breathes, tosses back his head, as with a slow retreat she pulls out of him as far as she dares and then drives back in. When he has fucked her before, this is how he fucked her- hard and deep and fast, and what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander she thinks as she fucks into him again, up to the hilt and he writhes underneath her, the angle almost wrong but not quite, and the straps readjust just a little, so the edge of one of them is only millimeters away from where she wants it, just as the rough cotton of the shirt rubs so briefly and fruitlessly against her nipples. She’s torn between two instincts, sliding the fingers of one hand between her legs regardless of anything, and between watching Montparnasse, the stretch of him around her, the way he swallows it so easily and so deep, the same terrible hunger here as she has seen in his eyes before. She closes her own eyes, but the image is blazoned behind them, the thickness of his cock as he strokes it against his stomach, so hard it doesn’t seem possible that he hasn’t come yet.

 

When she opens them, he’s staring at her, hazed with pleasure but still sharp and aware, and she slams forward harder, doesn’t like the way his eyes look at her as though he’s seeing everything she thinks. Her hands have found his body and she wonders if he’ll bruise tomorrow with the force she’s exerting upon him, hopes that he has, that underneath his dandy clothes he’ll remember her. The minutes blend into each other, until it seems almost like she has never done anything but fuck Montparnasse, until unexpectedly he comes, seizes up around her so tight she can’t move, fingers motionless on his cock as he’s covered with his own essence. She’s almost weeping with frustration, the sight of him not enough, the pressure against her thighs a taunt not a release, and she fumbles between her legs for satisfaction, feels how wet she is, wet enough that her fingers merely slide off for a second. She has pulled free from Montparnasse, let his legs fall apart, but suddenly he is there pulling her hand away.

 

His own fingers are rougher than hers but she needs that at this moment, the ruthless way in which he rubs against her, experienced thumb pressing where she needs it the most, before his fingers slip to her entrance and push in without a by-your-leave, and she comes just like that, already so close to the edge that it took nothing more. She can feel herself convulse against his hand but doesn’t care, merely grinds against it, falling apart like he had seconds before until it almost hurts, she’s so sensitive, and then, and only then does he move away, flop back onto the bed, the woman’s illusion ruined, and she unclasps the straps with trembling hands and lets it fall to the bed, devoid of words for the moment.

 

Afterwards he gives her a dress. It’s not red, but it is pink and very pretty and not so far from her size. Marius does not notice her.


End file.
